Business Category

We’re in need of an experienced freelance digital project manager / producer to help our studio run smoothly. The work will include: daily direct client liaison, helping write schedules and proposals, and managing our remote development and art teams. We anticipate this taking up approximately 1 – 2 hours of a day, each day, so is not a full-time position. The key to this role is being able to help out daily but in small chunks of time.

You will work from your own home/office, but must live in the UK. You will be willing to travel for occasional client meetings, and dial in to weekly conference calls. Experience of web game production would be a massive bonus, but we’re happy to consider any digital production experience. We’re a small team working on some really cool projects – from our game framework to our contract games. The work is varied and if you’re a gamer (of any level!) then so much the better

If you feel you can whip our chaotically busy but massively talented studio into shape, then please send details of your experience and rates to rich@photonstorm.com or tweet me @photonstorm. Or pass this on to anyone you may know who would be suitable for the role.

It’s no secret that for nearly 2 years we’ve run a private business forum for HTML5 game developers. On it we listed all the portals and sponsors we dealt with and our experiences in doing so. So far we’ve got 32 portals added, all of them known to have bought games in the past.

Since launching the HTML5GameDev forums though it no longer made sense to keep that information under lock and key. I didn’t want to support two forums and two communities either. So I have merged all the sponsor details from the private forum into the public one, for all devs to benefit from.

Because the posts contain email addresses they are not visible unless you are an active forum member. By active that means you have an account on the forum and have been taking part in discussions. Therefore you must have a positive post count to be allowed access to the sponsor board. But once in you’re welcome to take advantage of this significant resource and hopefully contribute towards it too.

2013 is certainly well under way now. Christmas and New Years are all but a distant memory and I suspect all of us are now deep back in to our work. Although we enjoyed a brief spell away from the office it’s full steam ahead here right now.

I intended to write a summary of what 2012 meant for Photon Storm, but if I had to sum it up in one single word it would be: independence. 2012 was the year we went from being busy, hard working, full-time employees to being mentally busy, hard working, full-time-and-then-some but working for ourselves. And what a roller coaster of a ride it has been.

We took the concious decision to break away from Flash entirely and focus 100% on HTML5 games, specifically running in the mobile web browser. It was always meant to be a mixture of making our own games / IP, doing client work and collaborating on Kiwi, the HTML5 game framework we’re deeply invested in. In an ideal world those three elements would balance out quite evenly. Of course the reality is that client work sucked up a huge majority of our time – this is in no way a bad thing of course, given the current economic climate we are in no way complaining about having lots of work on the books, but it did present challenges to a company so small that we hadn’t anticipated tackling quite so soon.

Realtime Contest

First of all we’re happy to be one of the judges in the Realtime xRTML 3 contest that is now running. As their name implies Realtime provide some very smart web tech for real time push based messaging. This has massive application in HTML5 based multiplayer gaming. From a simple shared cursor experience to a proper full-on game. There are plenty of code examples on their site – and don’t be put off by the ‘enterprise’ focus either, the free tier has plenty of room to power a popular online game.

Talking at the BBC Fusion Games Summit

I’m pleased to be talking at the BBC Fusion Games Summit next week. I’ll be covering some of the stark realities of building for the mobile web and things to take into consideration when commissioning or pitching for HTML5 game projects. Although my talk is sold-out, if you’re attending the event then please come and say hello!

Sign-up for the Kiwi.js launch

We are getting increasingly close to a release of Kiwi.js, our HTML5 game framework built specifically for mobile browsers. It would be great if you could sign-up on our launch site and help to spread the word. The moment it goes live you’ll be first to know and we may even be throwing in some special offers too

My onGameStart presentation is up on Vimeo

Back in September I gave a talk at onGameStart about making money from your HTML5 games. The talk was called ‘Insert Coin to Continue’ and much to my dismay they filmed it all and put it online So feel free to watch me nervously trying to explain how to get your game sponsored. Despite my obvious nerves in public speaking the feedback I’ve had has been great, so it was worth it! Of course you should also check out the rest of the great videos, especially Rendering Voxel Worlds by Jonas Wagner, if only to see his priceless reaction when his brand new MacBook Pro falls off the lecturn

Storming Christmas Cards

We just had a bunch of company Christmas cards printed (by the ever excellent moo.com) featuring a cute new piece of pixel art by Ilija. We’ve had more printed than we need to send to clients and don’t want the rest to go to waste. So drop me a line with your name and postal address, and tell us what your all-time favourite game is (and why). Come December we’ll shove one into the mail for you, subject to quantity!

Since starting to run Photon Storm full time earlier this year I always told myself I was going to keep things small. A micro-business if you will. Just myself handling development, my wife handling projects and we outsource the rest. But we’re at the point now where we are turning down considerable projects every week just because there are not enough hours in the day.

While we could pass them on to other companies that doesn’t do anything to bolster our portfolio or create relationships with clients. I also don’t want to expand too fast, so it’s a careful balancing act. But after much discussion we’ve decided that we definitely need to recruit some part-time help. To that end we’re looking to recruit a remote working part time intern / junior developer. We’re also looking to bolster the number of freelance JavaScript developers on our books, so if you fall into that camp too then please read on.